Dog
Bites Man

The
New Yorker, May 5, 2005
Posted April 28, 2003
Talk of the Town
Comment

By Hendrik Hertzberg

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is the birthplace of
Gertrude Stein, the Duchess of Windsor, and Andy Warhol. Pennsylvania’s
largest urban conglomeration, Philadelphia, is known as the City of Brotherly
Love, and it also gave its name to the movie for which Tom Hanks, playing a
gay lawyer, won his first Oscar. A stone’s throw away, in neighboring
Camden, Walt Whitman, the poet of democracy and manly adhesiveness, spent his
golden years. All of that is well and good. But let’s not get any funny
ideas.

Pennsylvania’s junior United States Senator is Rick
Santorum, who has lately earned himself a spot of trouble by talking about
sex. Senator Santorum is widely regarded, not least by himself, as an
up-and-comer. At forty-four years of age, he already holds the exalted title
of chairman of the Senate Republican Conference. This makes him the No. 3 man
in the Republican leadership, just behind the Majority Leader, Bill Frist, and
the Assistant Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell. According to an official press
release, which was headed “Statement of U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA)
regarding misleading Associated Press story,” and which was put out last
Tuesday, “Senator Santorum recently sat down for an interview with the
Associated Press with an understanding that a profile piece would be published
regarding his 8-year tenure in the Senate.” The implication was that the
Senator had been sandbagged, but the profile in question had come out a few
days earlier, and at first glance it was hard to see why Santorum was
complaining about it. Its first sentence—

Sen. Rick Santorum, a
self-described compassionate conservative intent on climbing the Republican
leadership ladder, filters all politics and policy through one guiding
principle: what is best for the American family

—was nearly identical to the first sentence of the
“About the Chairman” section of the Senate Republican Conference’s Web
site:

Since joining the United
States Senate in 1995, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania has emerged as one of
the most effective defenders of the American family.

Nothing misleading in either of those, assuming your
definition of the American family is strictly limited to a husband, a wife,
and as many children as they can produce without interference from artificial
means of contraception. The supposedly misleading bit started a couple of
paragraphs further into the A.P. story, when the reporter, Lara Jakes Jordan,
quoted the Senator—who was discussing a challenge to the constitutionality
of Texas’s sodomy law, currently before the Supreme Court—as saying that
if the Court O.K.’s gay sex at home “then you have the right to bigamy,
you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the
right to adultery. You have the right to anything.”

A flap ensued. Santorum was taken to task—by Democratic
politicians, by newspaper editorialists in cosmopolitan cities, and by gay
organizations, including the patient, Job-like Log Cabin Republicans. He had
his defenders, too. Some agreed with Kenneth Connor, of the Family Research
Council, who said, “I think the Senator’s remarks are right on the
mark.” Others protested that those remarks had been taken out of context.
Still others, in the spirit of loving the sinner while taking no position on
the sin, drew attention to Santorum’s inner goodness. Majority Leader Frist
called him “a man of tremendous integrity, a deep faith, someone who
believes all men are created equal.” (No, wait—that’s what Santorum said
about Trent Lott four months ago. What Frist said last week was “Rick is a
consistent voice for inclusion and compassion in the Republican Party and in
the Senate.”) As for President Bush, his press secretary, Ari Fleischer,
said on Wednesday that “the President typically never does comment on
anything involving a Supreme Court case, a Supreme Court ruling, or a Supreme
Court finding—typically.” (When a reporter made reference to the fact that
the President had given a speech expressly to comment on an affirmative-action
case now before the Court, Fleischer replied that that was why he had stressed
the word “typically.”) By Friday, though, Fleischer was saying that Bush
“has confidence in Senator Santorum,” whom he thinks is “an inclusive
man.” People’s sexuality, Fleischer added airily, is “not a matter the
President concerns himself with.”

A few hours after the original story moved on the wire,
the A.P., no doubt stung by charges that it had quoted Santorum unfairly, made
public lengthy excerpts from a transcription of the interview. The excerpts
have bounced around the Internet, but they have not received the sustained
attention that, as a sample of the quality of mind of one of the nation’s
most powerful legislators, they deserve. Excerpts from the excerpts:

MS. JORDAN: I mean, should
we outlaw homosexuality?

MR. SANTORUM: I have no
problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts. As I
would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of
traditional heterosexual relationships. And that includes a variety of
different acts, not just homosexual. I have nothing, absolutely nothing
against anyone who’s homosexual. If that’s their orientation, then I
accept that. And I have no problem with someone who has other orientations.
The question is, do you act upon those orientations? So it’s not the
person, it’s the person’s actions. And you have to separate the person
from their actions.

MS. JORDAN: O.K., without
being too gory or graphic, so if somebody is homosexual, you would argue
that they should not have sex?

MR. SANTORUM: We have laws
in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that have sodomy
laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they
undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme
Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then
you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the
right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to
anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes,
it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that
doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution.. . . In
every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge
included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not,
you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one
thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the
quality—

MS. JORDAN: I’m sorry, I
didn’t think I was going to talk about “man on dog” with a United
States Senator. It’s sort of freaking me out.

MR. SANTORUM: And that’s
sort of where we are in today’s world, unfortunately. The idea is that the
state doesn’t have rights to limit individuals’ wants and passions. I
disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are
consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they
desire. And we’re seeing it in our society.

MS. JORDAN: Sorry, I just
never expected to talk about that when I came over here to interview you.

One might point out, a little wearily, that bigamy and
polygamy, like other forms of marriage, are matters of contract law, not of
private consensual sex. Or that Santorum’s logic would dictate the
criminalization of adultery as well as homosexuality, with potentially
devastating consequences for both Houses of Congress. Or that to say that
homosexuality is “no problem” but actually doing anything homosexual
should be punishable by law is like saying that freedom of conscience includes
the right to think heretical thoughts but not to utter them. Or that Santorum
believes that while individuals have no “right to consensual sex within the
home” the state does have “rights to limit individuals’ wants and
passions,” which is to say their feelings. Or that—oh, never mind. It’s
probably unfair to parse Santorum’s pronouncements as if they were products
of ratiocination. No wonder, though, that liberal Democrats, moderate
Republicans, and other non-hard-right types are increasingly nostalgic for the
likes of Ronald Reagan (who delivered a forceful but unfortunately not fatal
blow to Republican homophobia when he opposed a referendum that would have
barred homosexuals from teaching in California’s public schools) and Barry
Goldwater (whose suspicion of Big Government did not include an opt-out
provision for bedrooms). Those were the good old days, even if we didn’t
know it at the time.